Hole-y Sleeves, Batman! and Other Things,Too

The beautiful thing (one of many beautiful things) about lace is that it requires us as knitters to pay attention to negative space.  The finished product is nothing but a lot of holes, framed by yarn.  It also looks (and measures!) nothing like the finished product while you are making it, so there is the element of surprise, too.  Case in point:

Ah, the enchanted forest of pins.  No, it doesn't really require this many for one little sleeve.  I just don't know when to stop.
 

Here's the sleeve, in all it's non-puffy glory.  It was supposed to be a short, gathered sleeve, until it redesigned itself as a longer, slimmer one.  I will confess that I historically have disliked to wear 3/4 length sleeves.  You know:  Neither long, nor short; neither fish, nor foul.  Pick a side already!   But I am pretty much enchanted by these sleeves, and I can't wait to try them out.  Who knows; maybe I just haven't met the right 3/4 sleeve yet.  Today should be cardigan finishing day, and then its only a matter of time until you can make one too!

News You Can Use:  This pattern will be the next thing I publish, and you should have it in time for summer knitting (and wearing!).  Stay Tuned, because it rocks out loud.

And speaking of Rocking Out Loud, I would like to thank especially my friend and supporter, Marilyn King of BlackWater Abbey Yarns for including me in her gorgeous newsletter this month.  Many new visitors have stopped by the blog:  To all of you, welcome, and thank you for your readership!  We have gobs o'fun here, (well I know I do), blathering on about whatever's on my mind and on my needles.  Clever reader Susan, of NY wrote to ask if there is a Faery Ring knitalong in the works, which I can't believe I never thought of myself.  Whaddya think?  If you are interested in such, drop me a line, and let's see if we can't organize a little something.

To my local pals, I want to remind you that I'm teaching at the TKGA Knit and Crochet show next week, here in Portland, and there are still a few spots available in my Mad Hatters class.  Please come and join us if you're able!

And finally, a Cunning Plan is hatching between me and the Smallies:  

We are learning about plying, and wondering why plying Kates only hold 3 bobbins, usually.  We have decided to perform an Experiment in Invention this weekend, in honor of Mother's Day:  We are going to construct our very own "Kate-Inator", conceived as a 6-bobbin Kate!  Check back to view the ensuing carnage/hilarity.

Same thing we do every day, kids:  Try to take over the world, one fiber at a time...
 

How the Mitten Saved the Sleeve

Let me begin by stating an empirical truth:  I like short, puffy sleeves.  I like designing them, knitting them, wearing them, and seeing them on other people.  To my mind, there is nothing more feminine or demure than a gathered sleeve cap, and paired with a lacy pattern and a short length for summer, they're knitting gold, baby. 

So there was no doubt in my mind about the way the sleeves for the Sommelier Cardigan needed to play out:  Short, Puffy, Sweet.  Naturally, since the design element was so clear in my mind, and no alternative ideas were even creeping up on it, what formed on my needles was nowhere near what I had planned.

To begin with, even though I measured precisely and calculated carefully, the math that I started with was (not surprisingly) Very Much Wrong.  I think there can be degrees of wrong in knitting: Kinda wrong, a little wrong, mostly wrong, you get the idea.  This sleeve was an extreme case from the word go.  Not that I let that bother me, you understand, equipped as I am with a powerful sense of denial.  I knit blithely on for seventeen rows of lace, never admitting that I had jacked up the whole plan the minute I stopped casting on and started knitting.  No Siree, nothing wrong here.  Nothing to worry about.

Until there was.  I began the armhole shaping after the lace border and immediately began to sense a disturbance in the Force. "It'll block larger", I lied to myself.  "There is no reason at all why I can't just stretch it."  Except, of course for the poor miserable knitters who would arrive at my door with pitchforks and torches, crying "THERE SHE IS!  GET HER!" once the pattern is published. 

That's the sucky thing about designing - you totally cannot fake anything, because you have basically promised your knitting brethren that you can be trusted to provide them with a pattern that will not drive them to the nuthatch.  At least, that's how I feel about it:  If you are brave enough to spend your precious knitting allowance on a project I dreamed up, then the least I owe you is my level best effort to make a pattern that can be followed to a successful conclusion.  This presumed oath of accuracy puts a lot of pressure on a designer: when I screw up my knitting, it's not just my personal goalpost that moves, it's yours, too. 

It was ultimately my allegiance to my fellow knitters which prevailed.  I admitted to myself that the sleeve was Bad Wrong, and had to be frogged.  My frustration was such that I actually put down my knitting (okay, I may have thrown it a little).  I reached without thinking for the nearest comfort, which is of course, more knitting.  In this case it was a sweet little mitten that I have been stealing moments of knitting time for.  Campbell's Mitten, with its lofty, fluffy Blue-Faced Leicester wool in shades of his favorite colors.  Thoughts of the process of making it so far danced in my mind:  Campbell hugging the fiber; me spinning the yarn; Lindsay measuring for me around his little hand.  The bliss of casting on with your own handspun is something I wish for every knitter.  There is just nothing like it.  I began to relax into the rhythm of kl, p1, kl.

And that's when the mitten saved the sleeve.  The relaxation triggered by the comforting action of knitting a mitten cuff brought clarity with it:  I don't have to knit the sleeve I thought I wanted.  I can keep knitting the sleeve that I have, and follow it to it's natural conclusion.  Even though I was trying for a gathered short sleeve, what I made was a svelte long one.  Better still, I could make it an elegant bracelet length.  Bracelet sleeves are delightful, classic, feminine, and even easy to block (unlike their short, puffy relatives).  Yes!  I could press on with the sleeve, exactly as it was, and create something even better than what I imagined.  There was nothing at all wrong with that little sleeve - the problem was the designer.

Thank you, dear little mitten.  You were there when I needed you most, and even if you get lost one day, as is often the case with mittens, you have already served a purpose even higher than keeping Cam's hand warm:  You saved my sleeve, my sanity, and most important, the composure of future knitters.  We who are about to knit salute you.

Chris and Nina

One fine day last week I checked the online postage tracking on some roving I had ordered, when I realized that it was sitting in my mailbox, right outside.  It was late in the day, and pretty much dark, but in my excitement to see what the fiber fairy delivered, I neglected both outerwear and porch lights.  This became important immediately for two reasons:

1.  It was raining (of course it was raining).
2.  My sadistic sociopath next-door neighbor had upended several of the bricks which trim the landscape area between our two driveways. 

This subtle, yet significant change in the elevation of the bricks I usually step lightly over on my way to the mailbox resulted in the following; expressed as an equation:

    Ass     x Dirt + Rain + Anticipation of New Fiber = Muddy, Bruised & Pissed
Tea Kettle

I don't remember the last time a stretch of wet flower bed rushed up to meet me so quickly, but the impact on my 39-year-old butt and my forward momentum was both immediate and profound.  Plus I was super muddy, and did I mention Pissed?  What kind of creature arbitrarily turns previously horizontal bricks on their ends?  The woman is a complete menace, which fact I asserted loudly to the sodden darkness around me, along with some other choice vocabulary that I'm glad the smallies couldn't hear.  I hauled myself up from the muck, just as the wetness of the mud broke the surface tension between my jeans and my lingerie.  Now my ass was both bruised and damp.  Recovering my enthusiasm to get to the mailbox, if not my dignity, I limped across the alley like a three-legged card table. 

I relate this experience because it illustrates so perfectly my core assumption:  Fiber Cures Everything.  Look what was in the mailbox that night!

Campbell seized on the fluffy mound of combed top the minute I explained that I had chosen it for him (his favorite colors = green + aqua)  He squished it in his arms and buried his face in it, proclaiming that it was his precious new pet, hereafter to be called "Chris".  Lindsay did the same with her pencil roving in shades of blue and violet, pronouncing hers "Nina", and forbidding me to play with it.  I assumed that as soon as the novelty wore off, the children would allow me to spin the fibers.  Or if not, they had to go to sleep sometime.  Strangely, it turned out to be the latter, when I realized days later that neither child had returned "their" fiber to  me for spinning.  I finally found both rovings in their respective smally rooms, hidden under the beds.  Creepy Development, that.  I don't know if there is room enough in our small house for more than one fiber hoarder.  Especially if they're gonna hog the good stuff:

"Chris": 420 yards of 3-ply BFL, 11 wpi.

Campbell asked for Chris to become a pair of mittens, and possibly a matching scarf.  I am happy to comply.  I love the way Chris' three plies are so blend-y.  Also crazy for the bounce and lustre of BFL.  It's always been a favorite of mine to knit, so spinning it seemed an obvious place to start.  The colorway is called "As Above, So Below", and you can get it here.

"Nina": 2-ply Corriedale, 14 wpi, with my first full bobbin, yardage TBD.

Lindsay has requested that Nina become a triangular shawl, which will be another first for me.  Corriedale is just the sproingy-est - so much fun to spin.  I tried it out in pencil roving, thinking that it would be easy to draft, which turned out to be true.  The 2 plies are very stripe-y, which I completely dig.  This colorway is named "Before Sunset", and you can find it here.

So that's the news from my house:  Butt bruised, fiber found, spinning spun.  Life Is Good.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I snapped out of it and did the required work on my book.  Still haven't decided on what my self-bribery reward will be though...I'm busy rearranging a certain number of my evil neighbor's bricks.